


Candyman

by royalblues



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: (almost snowballing), Angst, Asphyxiation, Blowjobs, Bottom Ryan, Cheating, Cocaine, Drug Use, Halloween, M/M, Mirror Sex, Post-Split, and I'm nothing if not correct about porn, breath play, slight BDSM, well d/s to be correct
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 06:33:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2537783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/royalblues/pseuds/royalblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a strange and beautiful thing to hate yourself so much you'd let someone else do this to you. Even stranger is trusting them enough to say these things and not mean it. Or mean it and <s>love</s> fuck you anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candyman

**Author's Note:**

> Could take place anytime; that's your call as a reader. This goes against all my core principles such as “ryden died a long time ago” and “brendon urie is as much a bottom as the lower half of a bunk bed,” but where's the fun in writing if you can't challenge yourself? This is _fiction_ written partly for aforementioned reasons and partly to quench [Mikey's](http://contusions.co.vu) thirst for bottom!ryan. Thanks to [Seren](http://eiqhties.tumblr.com) for encouragement.

Halloween: the one time a year where you dress up as the things you are not. This year Ryan is dressed up as Faithful Loving Boyfriend; he is dressed up as Sane Well-Functioning Human Being. Dressed up as Creative Intelligent Songwriter, dressed up as Not A Complete Mess, all of it last-minute ideas found in a box between two-person horse costumes and effervescent fairies, slutty nurses and slutty witches and slutty Bob the Builder ensembles.

“Brighten up, it's Halloween,” Z yells. She leaves behind a lipstick-print, a purplish-bruise on the ruffled collar of his costume. Then another on his cheek. It smells like wax; she smells like it, too. There's a fog machine or something in the corner, or maybe people just smoke so much in here that it looks and smells that way. Cigarettes hang from the severed bloody tips of everybody's fingers, between zombie-gray lips and unlit ones beneath the white stripes in The Bride of Frankenstein's wig.

“You're such a bore,” she says, sulking, her plum lips twitching downward in an annoyance that never comes across as real, only a parody of a petulant child denied dessert. She's never serious, even less so in her witch costume of spindly black, purple lace, a grand pointy hat atop her blonde hair. It's over-dimensioned, the size of it surreal; she could hide a few skeletons or monsters in there. He remembers laughing at it with her when they picked it out together, hand in hand, in a vintage costume shop a few weeks ago. Like a real couple, a real Halloween-celebrating costume-picking pair of lovers.

The music shifts to something with a wilder bass line, a warmer thud of blood and feet tripping over themselves on the dancefloor at an even faster pace. She calls, half-broken apart from him with one hip swaying on the floor already, “what you really need is some blow. Mike brought the good stuff tonight, he's up at the bar. Come back and we'll share it.”

So he complies, except he doesn't. Come back, that is, because two guys accidentally push him and he ends up in a deserted corridor that leads to the single-stall bathroom – that's how exclusive the club is, it has a single-fucking-stall bathroom – shielded behind a black door, an eerie feel to it even when it's not Halloween. A door man guards the corridor, the office, and VIP lounge farther down, and then this private bathroom. Ryan slips him a fifty, pushes open the door and enters this crypt of misery. The wet dream of any teenage goth.

Someone has decorated the bathroom: spiderwebs thick as sheep-wool now cover corners of the mirror, the toilet-paper roll, the toilet seat, the whole damn floor like a wall-to-wall carpet. Little liquorice-like flies are trapped in between the cotton-candy layers and glow-in-the-dark spiders. Theater-costume-department bones are stacked next to the toilet brush and bats hang from the ceiling in throngs like black, furry plastic grapes from equally furry plastic vines.  
  Some idiot has spent more effort decorating this one bathroom than the rest of the club. There's a single rectangle on the marble sink free of knickknacks: a neat little space for your coke and your sequined clutch bag and your integrity. Maybe all the decoration is supposed to keep you from shooting up in here. Bring you back to your childhood and all the fond memories you had before you became a socialite, a mastermind, someone with too much money and not enough to spend them on. 

_Applause for your effort, but it's not working,_ Ryan thinks, retrieving the sample bag from the folds of his outfit. The costume is the same as then, maybe by mistake, maybe intended by his subconscious. It's a floozy mess of white gauze. It's a ghost, a mummy, or a ghoul, something undead, which is ironic because that's exactly how he feels on the inside, which is ironic because he feels nothing at all.

Cheating's not that awful if you go by the standard “you can't help whom you fall in love with,” but when you lose interest in the person you cheated with and left your girlfriend for; that's when you're the bad guy, because essentially you're giving up on a love you deemed worth breaking someone else's heart over. Cheating isn't awful, but this is, the skulking off to private bathrooms, the churning of teeth lying awake at four in the morning and thinking none of this was worth it; none of this was what you really wanted. _It's too hard work; I don't feel like bothering. Can someone else come clean up my messes, because I'm leaving them alone; I'm bored with them, bored with my life. Bored with myself._

It was never like that with Brendon; it was hot, humid kisses in the abandoned tour bus, sweet little groans when Ryan sucked on his neck and repeated Brendon's name after each small bite. The first teasing, the second a warning, the third too lost in the stolen moment to label.

There was never anything established to break apart or a routine to bore them half to death. It was like picking up a flower and have its leaves fall off, surrendering to your touch. It was that easy and too god damn difficult to keep up; too god damned hard to let go of.

Ryan's drowning in this wallowing in the past, so he precariously lines up the powder – there's not a lot; this guy Mike's a cheap motherfucker – rolls up a bill and leans down for the sweet release.

It's grainy like someone mixed sand in it, not enough to evoke the same ecstatic thrill, or maybe he's done it too much. What used to cut like diamonds is now feeble rhinestones: iridescent in the soft purple light of the bathroom but not real, worth nothing. It's a roller coaster in slow motion; faux fur; pleather sofas; it's takeaway for breakfast; it's waxy lipstick, it's the most pathetic thing in the world and it's _good_ but not _enough._

When he looks in the mirror, a drop of blood rolls down his lips, candy apple red, devil red, red like the cape of a cheap vampire costume. Ryan thinks of vampire teeth sinking into his neck, fake ones, a very real tongue soothing the spot as if the plastic canines ever truly hurt. “You look ridiculous,” whispered in the claustrophobia of a closet. The dark smothering like all this fake spiderweb, the words blissfully freeing, like unlocking a pair of handcuffs. “Your costume look ridiculous, and I love it.”

Not stated out loud: _I love you._

“Do you, really?” Ryan had asked. They knew which statement he was questioning, although both pretended not to. Pretended it was only Halloween, the one night a year when people dress up as the things they are not. That year, Ryan was dressed up as Faithful Loving Boyfriend – The Prequel; he was dressed up as Creative Intelligent Songwriter; dressed up as Unaware of the Impending Doomed Future of My Band; dressed up as Not Heartbreakingly In Love with Brendon Urie.

“More than anyone else's,” Brendon had replied, the small possessive _'s_ teetering on the edge of inaudible.

And now he's in this bathroom with two more lines of coke left. The cadence of the bass no longer throbs in his veins; the soundproofed walls have rendered invasion of privacy impossible and for all he knows Z could be out there, banging on the door and demanding he let her inside and share his doling of coke. Except she wouldn't, because they give each other space; that's what makes them so great. That's why they work, but nothing works, not the album, not the new band, not the old band, not himself and least of all the damn air condition in the bathroom.

Ryan is dressed up as A Guy Who Can Be Satisfied, living A Satisfactory Indulgent Life. 

So he tries again. Like the myth of Candyman, he utters Brendon's name to the mirror. His liquor breath washes across the glass and fogs it up. He repeats it once because if you say it three times the guy shows up and ~~kisses you~~ ~~forgives you~~ ~~apologizes~~ ~~fucks you~~ kills you, and then he says it one last time. It's really more of a sigh, a plea. 

Nothing happens.

The bathroom is empty, silent. Through a haze Ryan opens the door. A hand greets him, just the hand, shoving him by the throat back into the room, familiar bruises on his neck in his lungs, his vision blurry and mouth like cotton.

“Seems you called for me,” Brendon says, an offhand comment. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Why are you dressed like that?” Ryan counters. 

Brendon removes the vampire teeth and steps closer, the door falling shut with a soft click, him saying “what do I know? I'm just a part of your sentimental fantasy.”

They stand there, two feet apart, staring at the familiarity of each others' faces. There's new lines, a different haircut, a more tightly set jaw. An unfamiliar disgust curls Brendon's lips upward and contorts his greatest feature into a sneer. Above it his eyes flit from the lipstick print on Ryan's collar to the blood under his nose and back to the lipstick print.

“You're bleeding.”

Ryan ignores him and points to the coke. “You want some?”

Brendon glances at the lines on the sink and the remaining two rows of crystalline white, so alluring, so disgusting. He surveys Ryan, skeptical, then shrugs. “Sure, why the hell not.”

Ryan watches him hunch over the sink with the clumsy, inexperienced movements of someone forging knowledge. He's unfamiliar with the process, hence he bends like he has seen Ryan do before people do in movies: his back stiff, his left shoulder blade jutting through the shirt where the cape has slipped down the side.

Ryan lets a tentative hand slide under Brendon's shirt, feels dimples and warm, tensed muscles that loosen under his touch. A low sniff sounds and Brendon wheezes, maybe because of Ryan's hand, maybe due to the rush directly into his brain. Like a minuscule train crashing off the rails and directly into your nasal wall.

“Shit,” he curses and lifts his head. He rubs a dusted finger above his teeth; some of the powder adheres to the cupid's bow of his upper lip. His eyes are wide and dark like pools of molasses, his lips sugared pink Turkish delight. Ryan kisses it off. Same sweet taste, same numbing buzz on the tip of his tongue when he licks away the remains from Brendon's gums.

And just like that the coke feels like the polished diamonds it's supposed to. Like soft fur. His hands tangle in the longest part of Brendon's hair.

“It's good, yeah?”

Brendon's breath wafts across Ryan's chin, smelling faintly of garlic (ironic, considering his costume), of real, homemade dinner. Beneath it there's a sour taste of too many liquors mixed. That could be Ryan himself, though; he hasn't eaten for a few days now, but it's okay. He nibbles on Brendon's lower lip instead. His hands chase across Brendon's shoulders and back – why the hell is there so much fabric in that cape – in a search for something: an apology, love, purpose, the meaning of life, whatever. He fits his hands inside the cheap black slacks that no real vampire would ever wear, cupping Brendon's ass, and in return receives a sweet groan against his neck.

Then he drops to his knees on the thick carpet of fake web on the floor, which doesn't hinder much of the sharp jab that jolts his bones, but that's okay, too. The zipper opens easily, allowing space for him to rub the heel of his hand on the jutting outline of Brendon's cock. Let his tongue flick across the small damp patch of fabric, re-familiarize himself with the shape and the taste as if he ever forgot anything from the eagerness to the expression on Brendon's face, the one where it looks like he's about to say something stupid like “I missed this” or, even worse, “I missed you.” He has the same expression as right before you spill a big secret like “I'm breaking up with you” or “will you marry me?” or “this band isn't working. _We_ aren't working.”

And he's not shutting up either, why can't he just shut up and let Ryan suck him off? Bruise his neck purple and blue like the shadows in the bathroom and under their eyes.

Ryan's not sentimental, despite anyone's claims, but this blowjob feels like stepping onto your porch on the first day of snow after a gray and drizzly autumn; like unwrapping presents on Christmas morning; like Brendon.

The pre-come's practically leaking onto his tongue as Brendon shifts Ryan's head around, digging his nails into the skin below the hairline. With every impossible attempt to swallow more spittle drips onto the cobweb as Brendon slides in, the head of his cock squashing Ryan's uvula. When he looks to the left he spots them in the full length mirror, his own bulging throat and Brendon's wildly twitching hips fucking his mouth so well.

“Stop,” says Brendon softly and tugs at Ryan's head. Mouth still full, Ryan elevates himself so they're at eye level. Brendon brushes his thumb across Ryan's lips, his mouth following after to lap away his own pre-come, mumbling those damned words, wet and warm like melted snowflakes, “missed this so much.” And despite the dirty action, the kiss is soft and unpolluted; a diametrical opposition to the following situation where Ryan will be bent over the sink, moaning, and the full-length mirror behind them will reflect them all backward and fucked up, the smaller mirror in front of them his own glazed eyes, the filthy gratification.

“So are you gonna fuck me or not?”

Brendon, half undressed and with his vampire makeup all smudged, is bouncing on the balls of his feet like a bashful schoolboy. “If you still want me to,” he answers, which is such a stupid, mocking answer that Ryan wants to bash Brendon's head into the sink for seeing through him.

Brendon pushes down the costume further until it bunches in floozy white ribbons around Ryan's thighs. He grinds their hips together briefly before he turns Ryan around to face the sink. The sound of ripping foil should come but the bathroom is silent as ever. _They really soundproofed this place well,_ Ryan thinks somewhere between Brendon lightly fondling his balls and roughly shoving him up against the marble sink again.

“You didn't bring a rubber?” The hopeful tone shines through the cracks in his voice, and he winces, hoping Brendon hasn't noticed.

But he has.

His fingers skate along the bumps and ripples of muscles in Ryan's back. Chills follow in his wake despite the heat and the hundreds of sweat pearls Ryan counts on his forehead after a quick glance in the mirror.

Amused, Brendon toys with a lock of Ryan's hair before he twists it, yanking Ryan back with it. Ryan emits a moan poorly obscured as a mere grunt of pain.

“So that's what you want? You want to feel my come dripping out of you, just like the good old times? Even though the door isn't locked? Should I lock the door or do you want someone to enter and see you spread out like a gaping whore, just for me?”

_Yes, so I don't have to explain myself when they open the door and catch me and I can just admit to being a cheater and a liar and a shitty fucking person._

“I know what you want.”

Not stated out loud: _you want to be mine for the night. Again._

Nonchalant, he continues: “but, I mean, I'm not risking anything. I don't know where you've been. Look at yourself. Look what you've become.”

He forces Ryan's gaze toward the smaller mirror so it catches their reflection: Brendon's syrup-eyes and fingers grasping Ryan's collar bone. His hand travels farther down, its nails leaving behind white-ink crescents while the other hand pushes Ryan's costume and underwear to his knees.

_Look what you've become._

The powder-traces around their nostrils, the ludicrous costumes, Ryan's right arm forced backward in a cramped grip on Brendon's neck. It's like looking into the future and the past at the same time.

The whatever-outfit now lies in a sad pool under the sink. Brendon's hand moves south to spread Ryan's legs, which are wider open than an actual whore's would have been anyway. His fingers, for some reason, are lubed up, rubbing slickly against Ryan's skin. There's an open drawer with dozens of matte black mini-tubes of lubricant, real designer crap matching the condoms next to them. The sheer amount of it means people have sex in here all the time. The bathroom fills with the ghosts of other people's intercourse, and suddenly it's awfully crowded, like ten people are standing behind them, watching Brendon scissor his fingers inside Ryan and reminding him just how disgustingly sentimental he truly is.

The slick noise is a warning bell, a symphony. Brendon almost drags out his fingers and says, voice low, rough, _abrasive:_ “You're so fucking awful. You don't deserve this, you don't deserve me touching you like this. Do you?”

It's a strange and beautiful thing to hate yourself so much you'd let someone else do this to you. Even stranger is trusting them enough to say these things and not mean it. Or mean it and ~~love~~ fuck you anyway.

“Please just fuck me”. The humiliation, the begging. Ryan doesn't beg, except like this when they both know the words cover their game covers the truth. If he lets go of the sink, he'll fall into the bundle of clothes at his feet.

“Since you ask so nicely”. The chill in Brendon's voice ripples through the too-hot bathroom. Without warning he pulls, no _yanks,_ out his fingers and pushes in so quickly that it burns. It hasn't been long enough, but it's been too long and it _hurts._ Ryan loves it.

“You really missed this.” It almost sounds like he doesn't believe it. “Do you ever bring home guys, or are you too ashamed to tell them this is what you really want; you just wanna get stuffed full of dick? Do you still have all the toys? You think of me when you use them, don't you?”

He uses rhetorical dirty talk just to test at which point Ryan's responses will dwindle to strangled, almost pained moans. Dwindle from denial to “yes” to “fuck me” to “my dog chewed up the red plug and I was angry because you bought it for my birthday so I ignored my own pet for ten hours and it was a stupid, petty thing to get so worked up about but I did.”

The coke is wearing off and the fall is too far; Ryan needs something to cling to other than Brendon's neck. The fog on the mirror has reduced their reflection to a big pink blur but he can still see his own eyes in there, too dark and absent for his own good. Jaw slack, saliva dripping onto his own collarbone, Ryan's just standing there like a limp doll taking it up the ass. Brendon's telling him stuff like “you filthy whore, you're so desperate” and Ryan's replying stuff like “can I please come down your throat”, expecting a “no” if they follow the game, having known Brendon long enough to recognize the stunted rhythm, the hiss that means _yes_ , means _remember all the times you did, though. You used to tell me you loved it, that you wanted an ice cream flavor named_ Ryan's Cum, _and you were joking but then again you kind of weren't._ God, how nostalgic. The scene needs a sepia filter.

He lets go of the sink with one hand to jack himself off, but it's not enough. No matter how brutally, it's not enough until it hurts. Maybe if it was mediocre, vanilla sex they could stop because you can get mediocre, vanilla sex everywhere. They stock it on the shelves between cheese and butter in the supermarket. This kind of trust doesn't exist outside the two of them.

“Choke me,” Ryan pants, because Brendon will, only him, “just fucking choke me.”

Brendon obeys and lets his hand venture up Ryan's throat before it tightens. “Elbow me if you want me to stop,” he says and Ryan ignores him in favor of blue stars in the ceiling. They aren't really there; there's only inches of spiderweb, and even if he's imagining everything from the visible night sky to Brendon, the purple light is no longer tacky but soft. The bathroom is almost congenial. Ryan shifts against the sink, grinding against it while Brendon fucks into him so harshly you hear bones crack, sinews snap, galaxies explode and collapse. Still not enough.

“Don't – Fuck, tighter.”

Brendon's fingers dig harder, pressing into Ryan's jugular and the hollow of his throat, pushing against his jaw bone. Ryan's tipping on the edge of a train-station and the trains are rushing by with 600mph. He's clinging to the ledge of a fifty story building, swaying in the wind, hanging by eight fingertips. His head is underwater, in the clouds, on fire; his eyelids are black and gold and violet fourth of July fireworks on Halloween. Right after this one spectacular spark – pink shimmers, purple bruises, his neurons and synapses ablaze, Brendon driving into his prostate, it feels like someone removes the chair under him or switches off his life-button and everything turns black.

He wakes to cold water in his face. His body wants to jerk alive but it's too tired, so he just twitches and slumps back into the hold someone – Brendon – has on him. Ryan's head is in Brendon's lap, in his field of view is Brendon's chin and a torn vampire cape.

“You passed out.”

A hoard of questions climb up Ryan's throat, skate along his teeth and get knocked out against his gritted teeth, dying on the tip of his tongue. _Why are you holding me like that? What time is it? How long can we be in here? Do we have to leave?_ He sticks to one that doesn't twist his tongue to impossible boating knots: “for how long?”

Brendon doesn't reply. He wrings a washcloth and places it on Ryan's forehead. Rolls his eyes, gently strokes Ryan's pulsing temple. After twisting the toilet-paper and the subject enough, he begins: “it's not my problem anymore, but you –”

“It never was.”

“What?”

“Your problem. It's not my problem either. It's not a problem,” Ryan grits out between his teeth. He must have bit his own tongue; his mouth tastes metallic.

“Are you even listening to yourself? You passed out.”

“You were choking me. That shit happens.”

Brendon silences. He choked Ryan because Ryan asked for it, he stayed, and now he's sitting and stroking Ryan's hair like some personal care worker, even though Ryan never asked for that. It's four in the morning at least, so Ryan almost suggests they split a cab home before he remembers that Brendon's home is a tour bus and he forgot his own address after living with various friends for the past two months.

And now, all of a sudden, he wants to split a fucking cab with Brendon and stop at an IHOP and share a plate even though he isn't really hungry and hasn't been all week. He just wants to sit and watch the grease drip from Brendon's lips and be dressed as A Total Failure, be dressed as Liar Liar: Pants On Fire, a twenty-dollars Never Showing Affection costume he can ditch as soon as they enter Brendon's appartment, which Brendon lives in _alone._

But it doesn't happen; he doesn't; it isn't him. The man he wants to be, perhaps, but Ryan is The Guy Who Passes Out From Doing Too Much Coke, he is Pathetic Junkie Rock Star Cliché, he is No Longer Brendon Urie's.

What happens is: he pushes himself out of Brendon's hold and braces himself against the toilet. He leans his head on the seat and ignores Brendon's half-glare, half-guilt. 

They pass a sticky span of time like this, snailing along, without saying or meaning anything but _fuck you for fucking us up you fucking pathetic junkie._ If Ryan is addicted to coke – and he isn't; it's just a few times at a few parties some times every day several times a day – Brendon is addicted to adoration, and if he can't have it, attention will suffice. They're junkies, the both of them.

Brendon raises himself from the floor, scattering a pile of the prop bones. He knocks his head on a bat but takes no notice; he's still looking half-peeved, half-pitying.

“Next time we pick a place where your friends aren't all waiting for you thirty feet away,” he says, his voice low but incisive, his back turned, shoulders tensed. He opens the door and some of the heat seeps out as he leaves.

Ryan nods, but the door has already slammed. Then he ambles into the corridor, pretending all he did was do some blow in the bathroom. The red cape flutters as Brendon careens around a corner at the far right end of the corridor.

A thought sparks in Ryan's brain to follow him, so for one, two, twenty looping seconds he just stands there in his costume wobbling between right and left, left and right, and the longer he stands there the chances grow that Brendon is hailing a cab, driving away, going to bed, loathing himself with twice the velocity Ryan does.

As all of this does or does not happen, like a twisted _Schrödinger's Affair,_ Ryan turns. He pushes pasts the doors and allows the throngs of the dancefloor to absorb him until the next time and the next bathroom.


End file.
